During the industrial manufacture of sausages, the produced products are transferred directly from the filling machine onto a hanger. The pairs or loops of sausages are here preferably hung at the portioning point between two sausages on a hook. The sausages are then manually taken up with a smoke stick. This is then hung in a smoke trolley by the operator. The smoke trolley is then in turn pushed into a smoke chamber. The wide variety of different smoke sticks, smoke trolleys and sausage products significantly complicates the automation of the charging of smoke sticks and smoke trolleys. Therefore, so far no automated systems have been employed. Alternatively to this procedure, there are instead of smoke chambers also systems which smoke the products in a continuous run. Due to the more simple conditions for the automation of continuous systems here automated systems are employed for charging and unloading this equipment.
To transfer the sausages hanging on the hook of a hanger, the smoke stick is introduced between the suspended products. To do this, first a gripper module grips the smoke stick at one end. In the next operational step a handling system or robot moves the smoke stick into the hanger. In the next operational step the robot moves the second gripper module onto the smoke stick and grips it at the other end. Thus, the robot can remove the smoke stick complete with the products from the hanger. No high cycle rates can be achieved with this system. Furthermore, the sausages must here be very uniform and must be hung such that there is a free intervening space for introducing the smoke stick. With this solution a hook in the central region of a group of hooks must be removed so that the second gripper module can grip the smoke stick. A group of hooks is taken to mean the group of hooks from which the products are transferred to a smoke stick. Due to this the maximum loading on the smoke stick is reduced. This is significant in particular with smoke sticks for smoke trolleys, because they are only approx. 1,000 mm long. Furthermore, with this known solution gripping the smoke stick at one end complicates the reliable deposition of the smoke stick in a smoke trolley.
In particular the deposition is also found to be difficult, because many smoke trolleys have tolerance errors.
Moreover, in the state of the art there is the problem that with the removal of the products hung on the hooks, the products are not properly aligned downwards, but lie instead obliquely on the smoke stick. This means for example that the twist-off point between two products, that is between two sausages, does not hang at the upper end or at the upper tip of a star-shaped smoke stick. This is in particular because the smoke stick must be guided to the side of the hooks when lifting.